Lockheed Wins Big Shuttle Pact

April 22, 1989|By New York Times News Service.

WASHINGTON — Lockheed Corp.`s Missiles and Space Co. division and Aerojet General Corp.`s Space Booster Co. unit were selected Friday as the principal contractors to build the next generation of solid-fuel rocket boosters for the space shuttle.

They will replace the rockets built by Morton Thiokol Inc. that were blamed for the Challenger shuttle disaster three years ago.

Morton Thiokol of Chicago had previously announced that it would not bid for the contract to produce the new rocket. It plans to redesign and refine the current boosters before leaving the business at the middle of the next decade.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the contract for developing the rocket engines, building a manufacturing plant and producing 12 test rockets should be worth about $1.2 billion.

Aerojet, a unit of Gencorp Inc. that is based in La Jolla, Calif., said it expected to receive ``more than half`` of that sum.

NASA said the newly designed boosters would power the shuttle fleet from the mid-1990s onward.

Aerojet`s booster is to be produced at a new factory in Yellow Creek, Miss., that will be owned either by the government or the contractor, with an arrangement to transfer the site to the government if another contractor is selected later.

The contract, which is still to be negotiated, would have to specify that the facility could be transferred to the government if at some point in the future another contractor was selected to build more rockets.

NASA said it would negotiate with Lockheed of Sunnyvale, Calif., as the prime contractor on the seven-year development program. Lockheed said Aerojet would serve as the chief subcontractor and would design, test and build the engine.

If this phase is successful, NASA has the option to order up to 88 additional motors under a supplemental contact estimated to be worth an additional $1 billion, said Jerry Berg, a NASA spokesman at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., which supervises shuttle engine programs.

Lockheed will supervise the program, overseeing construction of the rockets as well as the new production and test facilities in Louisiana, Alabama and Florida.

The $200 million to $300 million production plant would be built by Rust International Corp., of Birmingham, Ala., a unit of Henley Group Inc. It would be at Yellow Creek in northeastern Mississippi, near the borders of Alabama and Tennessee.